The changing market represents a vast opportunity for businesses to improve their relevance and expand their market in the online world. Researchers predict e-commerce will be 17 percent of U.S. retail sales by 2022, according to Digital Commerce 360. The U.S. will spend about $460 billion online in 2017. These figures will continue to climb as mobile and internet use expand both in the U.S. and in developing markets around the world.

The first step to starting an eCommerce business is deciding what products you’re going to sell. Finding a profitable idea can be hard work, so be prepared to do some serious digging and thinking. It’s essential that you choose products with healthy margins that will allow you to turn a profit and scale the business in the future. Once you know what you want to sell, you’ll need to decide how and where you’re going to source the products. The four main methods of sourcing products and inventory are making, manufacturing, wholesale and dropshipping.

First of all, let’s keep in mind that WooCommerce is eCommerce software, while Shopify and Bigcommerce are eCommerce services that don’t require any installation per se. To get started with WooCommerce, you first need to find a good host, install WordPress on your account, and only then you can proceed to the WooCommerce part of the deal. Luckily, these days all good web hosts offer one-click installs for WordPress. (For that, we recommend WooCommerce hosting with SiteGround.)

SuiteCommerce enables B2B and B2C merchants to rapidly create unique, personalized, and compelling branded shopping experiences across multiple channels. Differentiate your brand and exceed customer expectations, whether it is through mobile, online, or in-person, and empower your sales associates to provide engaging customer acquisition and retention experiences by utilizing a single source of item, inventory, customer and order data to feed your customer-facing systems. SuiteCommerce's integrated cloud-based nature unifies business applications and provides a central repository for order management and customer details, item and inventory data, creates seamless, omni-channel, brand experiences, and streamlines your business for continuous growth.
SoundCloud essentially serves as the YouTube of music uploading, meaning anyone can upload their tracks to the site before specifying whether they’re available for download or strictly for streaming purposes. Moreover, the site touts an extremely active user community and one of the sleekest user interfaces of any site on our list, one conveniently lined with a navigational bar at the top and direct access to the service’s accompanying mobile apps. Artists might not always offer free downloads of their music, but the labels nearly always do. Fair warning: SoundCloud’s had a bit of financial trouble recently, so you might want to visit the site soon and go on a downloading spree just in case the site goes kaput.

When Last.fm was initially created in 2002, it functioned as an internet radio station in a similar fashion to Pandora and iHeartRadio. In 2005, however, the site adopted Audioscrobbler, a music recommendation system that collects data from dozens of media players and music streaming websites to craft individual user profiles that reflect musical taste and listening habits. Last.fm has now “scrobbled” info from nearly 100 billion plays, which total more than 7 million years’ worth of listening.

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eComchain is Cloud-based eCommerce platform hosted on AWS. Its unique offering is its B2B2C model, first of its kind for Manufacturers, Distributors / Dealers and end Consumers for various verticals of the business. With eComchain, a manufacturer can reach out to a network of dealers and distributors on the eComchain's B2B eCommece platform. These network of dealers and distributors can in turn reach out to their end consumers through their branded specialized sites on the same eComchain platform hosted by the manufacturer.

Selz is very affordable, especially when you consider its features compared to comparably priced ecommerce platforms. Not only is it incredibly easy to use, but it also offers integrations for selling through WordPress, Facebook, and other independent websites. It also offers many security features and customer-friendly delivery options for merchants selling digital products.
Tracey Wallace is the Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce, where she covers all things ecommerce: marketing, design, development, strategy, plus emerging trends, including omnichannel and cloud replatforming. She is often featured in publications, such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and ELLE, along with leading BigCommerce partners like HubSpot and Square. She launched her career in ecommerce with Y-Combinator backed Shoptiques.
Your first step should be to learn about what WooCommerce is and what it can do for your ecommerce site. Then, you can begin to make sense of the platform’s main features, how they work, and the steps you’ll need to take to turn your fledgling store into a successful one. This may sound like a lot of ground to cover, but if you have the patience for some upfront work, you’ll reap the rewards over the long term.
With the holidays fast approaching, are you looking to buy presents online? The holiday season has become synonymous with online shopping. This isn't really surprising as physical stores usually attract crowds of deal hunters. This often conjures up images of throngs of people waiting in line outside the store, some even camping out. This activity is tolerable for some and even fun for others. [More...]
X-Cart is an eCommerce platform that is used to create an online store. X-Cart is available both as a downloadable self-hosted licensed software and as a cloud-based cart, hosted by X-Cart team, yet with your full access to the code for customisations. It supports tons of eCommerce features either out of the box or as a ready-made extension. Installing a new module does not require technical knowledge or access to the server: the marketplace is App Store - like, right within the admin backend of the store. X-Cart offers 24/7 technical support. Besides, you can get a full stack of services directly from the software vendor: custom development, web design, eCommerce hosting and SSL certificates.
Inventory control software allows companies to manage the availability of the products they sell online. This type of software can also be used to identify the products’ quantities required to fulfill demand, for inventory valuation, and inventory transfers between warehouses and locations. All these features are vital to ensure that companies ship the right products for each consumer and customer.
Let’s start with a fact. When it comes to e-commerce plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce is definitely the world’s most popular. There’s no doubt about it, since it powers about 30% of all online stores out there. That’s huge! And if you wonder where all this success comes from, we’ll let Tuts+ instructor Rachel McCollin answer for us in her course A Beginner’s Guide to Using WooCommerce:
While there are many types of software that you can use, customizable, turnkey solutions are proven to be a cost effective method to build, edit and maintain an online store. How do online shopping carts differ from those found in a grocery store? The image is one of an invisible shopping cart. You enter an online store, see a product that fulfills your demand and you place it into your virtual shopping basket. When you are through browsing, you click checkout and complete the transaction by providing payment information.
E-commerce has the capability to integrate all inter-company and intra-company functions, meaning that the three flows (physical flow, financial flow and information flow) of the supply chain could be also affected by e-commerce. The affections on physical flows improved the way of product and inventory movement level for companies. For the information flows, e-commerce optimised the capacity of information processing than companies used to have, and for the financial flows, e-commerce allows companies to have more efficient payment and settlement solutions.[69]
Site123 is an eCommerce platform with a pricing system that is very easy to understand, and its standout feature is its sidebar-based website builder, which makes laying out pages much more efficient than traditional drag-and-drop builders. Site123 is the perfect option for those who want to get their store up and running without any development skills, and who want to be sure that they won’t be priced out of the market as they build their businesses.
Lack of payment processors can be troublesome at times, especially when other ecommerce platforms offer plenty of payment options. The global marketplace entitles Tictail to take a commission. However, the custom shop (which comes at a reasonable price on a yearly basis) frees you from paying anything additional to Tictail for each sale happening there.
Internationally there is the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN), which was formed in 1991 from an informal network of government customer fair trade organisations. The purpose was stated as being to find ways of co-operating on tackling consumer problems connected with cross-border transactions in both goods and services, and to help ensure exchanges of information among the participants for mutual benefit and understanding. From this came Econsumer.gov, an ICPEN initiative since April 2001. It is a portal to report complaints about online and related transactions with foreign companies.
Live Music Archive is essentially a partnership between Internet Archive and etree.org, a community dedicated to providing high-quality, lossless versions of live concerts. You can think of it as a bootlegger’s paradise given the site’s sheer abundance of concert material, much of which focuses on jam bands such as the Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, and Sound Tribe Sector 9. Still, there are a host of other bands to choose from — The Smashing Pumpkins, Jack Johnson, Animal Collective, etc. — along with plenty of genres to browse, ranging from jazz to reggae.
Bigcommerce also has a nice library of themes for you, divided into multiple categories, and all of them responsive and fully customizable. They were developed to establish a more modern, fluid user experience, utilizing cool new merchandising features for categorization and differently sized catalogs. There are both free and paid options available, and I have to say that those free ones really are attractive-looking.